Mr. Painter looked as though he wanted to argue this, but then Mr. Buckley seized him by the elbow. Nodding brusquely to Penelope, he towed his fellow constable outside, to wait in the lane.
Agatha waited until she heard thesnickthat meant Jenny had shut the door behind them. “What do we do, then?” she said to Penelope. “I take Mrs. Turner out the back and into the wood, while you stall and then eventually ‘discover’ she’s run off?”
Penelope grinned, a sunburst of a smile that made Agatha’s heart swell with joy. “I always knew you’d be a natural conspirator—but unless Nell wants otherwise, I think this is a problem we should face head-on.” Her smile turned evil at the corners. “All three of us.”
She walked down the hallway toward the kitchen, Agatha scrambling up from the table to catch up.
“She was singing the Wasp’s ballads for half the evening last night,” Agatha cautioned, balling her hands in her skirts so she could match Penelope’s determined stride. “Those have already been labeled seditious libel.”
“The printed broadsides, yes,” Penelope returned. “Butsingingthem isn’t necessarily criminal. It all depends on how you argue the law.”
“And how do you think Mr. Oliver will argue?” Agatha returned.
Penelope’s hands clenched. “I intend to be there to find out.”
They collected Nell, who went grim at the news but who was not surprised: “Breach of the peace—that’s one of the ones they like to use against ballad sellers.” She accepted Penelope’s offer of help, and the three of them met the special constables in the lane.
Penelope walked arm in arm with Mrs. Turner, head high, an unaccustomed bonnet jammed over her curls. Mr. Painter went in front, huffing angrily into his mustache whenever the ladies behind walked too slowly for his taste.
Agatha went behind, dragging her boots in the dust.
It chilled her to leave the blue vault of the spring sky and step into the dead gray stone space of the vestry, musty with age, where the sunlight had to claw its way down through centuries upon centuries of pious dust. Mr. Oliver was sitting at a broad wooden desk, polishing his spectacles, and Squire Theydon was paging through the third volume of Burn’sThe Justice of the Peace, and Parish Officer. They both rose when the party arrived.
The ladies were now officially outnumbered. Agatha tried not to let her nerves show in her face.
“Ah, Mrs. Flood,” said the vicar. “I wondered if you might come in person.”
“You know I always want to see the right thing done, Mr. Oliver,” Penelope replied. She dragged one of the heavy chairs over, and took a seat as close to Mrs. Turner as she could.
The vicar smiled beatifically. “Then let’s not dawdle.”
He proceeded to open the session with all proper oaths and forms, which ate up several minutes and caused Agatha’s eyes to glaze over and her brain to turn into porridge. Even Mr. Buckley was looking a little dazed by the time Mr. Oliver finished the forty-three separate attestations of loyalty and honor to King George. He pronounced each one quite as seriously as if the monarch would magically know if he skipped one or two of them.
Mrs. Turner was sworn in, and the twisty legal arguments began.
It was, as Penelope had said, not at all settled if Eleanor Turner had committed a crime or not. It depended on so many interwoven details: whether the “Lady Spranklin” tune referred to Lady Summerville, a full catalog of the ballad’s innuendoes—which were apparently something altogether else in legal terms than what Agatha understood them to be in everyday English; separately, whether the song was a public slander when sung, a libel when printed, or merely an insult delivered between private parties, whether performing the ballad counted as a new publication of that libel or not, how the character and context of the Four Swallows impinged upon all these questions...
Agatha found a lot of it impossible to follow—though Mrs. Turner apparently didn’t, and was quick to cite certain statutes and cases in her defense, a few of which had Squire Theydon flipping through the pages of Burn like a card sharp shuffling a dodgy deck. This was clearly not the ballad singer’s first time in front of a magistrate, but as the arguments went on and on and on, her voice grew higher and more frantic, and Penelope’s polite posture turned more and more wooden.
Agatha squirmed in her seat, and felt helpless, and tamped down the desire to hit someone—anyone—if it would speed things along. Trial by combat suddenly seemed an eminently sensible system.
Mr. Oliver, too, was looking more than a little frayed at the edges. “I do think you might be reasonable, Mrs. Turner,” he said with a long-suffering sigh. “I understand that the Four Swallows offers you gainful employment—though I do note that, as a churchwoman, you ought to be frugal enough to support your family handily on the salary your husband brings in, or to have him apply to the parish officers if you are in need of relief.”
Mrs. Turner snorted, either at the uselessness of the suggestion or the description of herself as achurchwoman.
“Perhaps you might consider more wholesome subjects of performance,” Squire Theydon offered. “My old nurse used to sing ‘An Hundred Godly Lessons’ to me before bedtime, and it always put me right to sleep.”
“I’m sure it did,” the singer muttered.
The good squire’s brows beetled.
Mr. Oliver sighed. “It showed exceedingly poor judgment, Mrs. Turner, that you picked such a notorious piece to perform before an audience who had already been worked up into a froth by the evening’s dramatics. I understand you are not the author of the slanderous song, and so are not originally liable for its harms where the law is concerned—”
Mrs. Turner, Penelope, and Agatha all breathed a little easier.
“—but I have to consider something more than the law: I have to consider what is good. For Melliton, and for the good householders of the parish. So if my fellow justice of the peace agrees with me...” Squire Theydon was already nodding. “Then I think it only fit to demand a surety for your future good behavior...” He licked his lips. “How does Burn put it, Mr. Theydon?”
“‘He—’that’s us justices, of course‘—he has a discretionary power to take such surety of all those whom he shall have just cause to suspect to be dangerous, quarrelsome, or scandalous; as of those who sleep in the day, and go abroad in the night; and of such as keep suspicious company; and of such as are generally suspected to be robbers, and the like—’”
